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NATIVE AND NONNATIVE PROCESSING OF ACTIVE AND PASSIVE SENTENCES

THE EFFECTS OF PROCESSING INSTRUCTION ON THE ALLOCATION OF VISUAL ATTENTION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 December 2018

James F. Lee  and
Stephen Doherty
James F. Lee*
Affiliation:
University of New South Wales, Sydney
Stephen Doherty
Affiliation:
University of New South Wales, Sydney
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to James F. Lee, School of Humanities and Languages, 258 Morven Brown Building, UNSW Sydney, NSW 2052. E-mail: james.lee@unsw.edu.au
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Abstract

The present study compares native and nonnative processing of Spanish active and passive sentences. The nonnative speakers were tested before and after receiving processing instruction on the Spanish passive. The native speakers were tested once and provide a baseline for comparisons. We measured accuracy and response time to select the correct response in a paired picture matching task. We used eye-tracking measures to capture processing behaviors on both active and passive verb forms. We measured processing using time to first fixation on the verb area of interest, mean first fixation duration, mean first pass time, and mean second pass time. The results revealed that processing passive sentences comes at a cost to both native and nonnative speakers. After instruction the nonnative speakers showed no significant differences with native speakers in accuracy and response time. Also, the nonnative speakers’ processing behaviors became more nativelike but did not reach the native speaker level.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 41 , Issue 4 , September 2019 , pp. 853 - 879
Open Practices
Open materials
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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Footnotes

The experiment in this article earned an Open Materials badge for transparent practices. The materials are available at https://doi.org/10.13140/rg.2.2.10174.54086.

We would like to acknowledge that the Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences through the School of Humanities & Languages funded various aspects of this research through the Faculty Research Grants and Conference Travel Grants to both authors. We presented aspects of this study at the Pacific Second Language Research Forum in Tokyo in 2016, the Symposium on Second Language Acquisition Research: A Psycholinguistic and Neurolinguistic Perspective at the University of Portsmouth in 2018, and the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese in Salamanca in 2018. We are grateful for the feedback we received from audience members in general. Special thanks are owing to Alessandro Benati, Michael Leeser, Ronald Leow, Paul Malovrh, Nuria Sagarra, Cristina Sanz, Michael Ullman, and the SSLA reviewers. Any remaining deficiencies are our own.

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